Udeepta Chakravarty

‘Fascism’ and ‘populism’ are two political concepts with radical indeterminacy and considerable conceptual overlap. Many scholars have attempted to differentiate between the two concepts, but these attempts are embroiled in confusion. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's post-Marxist theorization of populism, in particular, stands accused of making all politics equivalent to populism and as such makes meaningful distinctions between populism and fascism impossible. This paper argues otherwise. It provides a synthetic reconstruction of post-Marxism to show how it is the most theoretically robust avenue through which one can begin to conceptually discriminate between ‘populism’ and ‘fascism.’